A recent posting on the Robert X. Cringely blog at PBS.org suggesting that IBM might lay off about 150,000 U.S. employees may have contributed to concern about impending job cuts at the company. The posting set off a flurry of comments across the Web.

On a newsgroup on the [email protected] Web site, several IBM employees posted a note they received from management calling Cringely's blog posting inaccurate and based on gross exaggerations. The letter confirms that the company has recently implemented a "focused resource reduction in the US," but says that IBM currently only has about 130,000 employees in the US.

[email protected] said in early May that IBM recently laid off more than 1,300 US workers from its global services division.

Over the past few years, IBM has quickly grown its operations in India and China and some employees may fear that growth will come at the expense of the US operations.